Bloom Energy Box Revealed on CBS 60 Minutes

60 Minutes reports that the magic behind the Bloom Box starts with the company baking basic sand and cutting it into little squares that are turned into a ceramic, which are then coated with green and black “inks.” Using a special process Bloom creates these ceramic discs and stacks them together interspersed with metal plates of “a cheap metal alloy.” The bigger the stack the more power the Bloom Box will create.

Perhaps at the Wednesday press conference there will be technical details. Scaling down a natural gas plant and providing similar costs and reliability would be a big deal. On site power generation would avoid losses of electricity from transmission of power over the grid.

Bloom energy has received about $400 million in funding and has been developing the technology for about eight years. Kleiner Perkins and other major Venture Capitalists are backing Bloom Energy.

Google told Fortune that it has a 400 kilowatt installation from Bloom at its headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Ebay has installed Five of the Bloom boxes and they supply 15% of the power of the campus and have saved Ebay $100,000 in electricity costs in nine months.

Fuel Cell Energy, Inc., a small firm based in Danbury, Connecticut that went public in 1992 and has over 60 fuel-cell installations worldwide at companies ranging from Pepperidge Farm to Westin Hotels. Like Bloom, it also hasn’t figured out how to make money, losing $71 million last year on revenues of $88 million.

2009 World Fuel Cell report – The world commercial market for fuel cells — including revenues associated with prototyping and test marketing activities, as well as actual product sales — will more than triple to $1.9 billion in 2013 and then almost triple again to $5.1 billion in 2018. so the 2009 world fuel cell market was about $500-600 million. The world battery market was $71 billion.